5/23/2006 @ 3:00PM

Work As Play

An acquaintance of mine solved an important problem for
Intel
and was rewarded with a sum sufficient to support him for the rest of his life. Since then he has spent his time riding motorcycles and thinking about interesting and important issues raised by computer technology. That was the right choice from his standpoint and certainly from mine–his ideas have informed some of my published work–but it was definitely the wrong choice from Intel’s standpoint.

For a more recent example of the same problem, consider
Google
. Early employees were rewarded with stock options that turned quite a lot of them into multimillionaires. How does Google keep them coming to work? By making working for Google as nearly as possible the job those people would choose if they didnt have to work for a living–because they dont.

Smart people like being around other smart people, so one way to keep them is to hire lots of other smart people; Google is famous for a recruiting process designed to do precisely that.

Another inducement is a lot of freedom. At Google, 20% of working time is spent under the workers own direction on a project of his own invention. Both approaches mirror those used by universities to attract and keep the kind of people they need for their business. The main reason I havent taken early retirement is that being a professor is simply more fun than not being a professor.

The problem of making work fun is not limited to elite universities and technology powerhouses. For evidence that it is both important and difficult, consider all of the work that people do for free, because they regard it as play. That includes games–one of the smarter people I know is a world-class bridge player–hobbies and much else. I know people who–for fun–plan, run and cook medieval feasts for several hundred guests. I know other medievalists who, every year, without pay, participate in putting on a two-week-long event attended by more than 10,000 people. My medieval friends include some who have the talents needed to be a successful entrepreneur or businessmen but choose to use those talents on their hobby while making a modest but adequate living selling shoes or teaching school.

The recent rise of online games, such as World of Warcraft, provides a bigger example: Millions of people are mining and making, buying and selling, speculating and–in one case I know–cornering a market–in purely virtual worlds. Not only do they do it for free, they pay for the privilege.

The reason people play instead of working is clear enough. A job has to produce something. That requirement constrains, sometimes quite narrowly, what employees do. A game, on the other hand, can be designed with a single objective–making it as much fun to play as possible.

There have always been people who put their passion into play rather than work, but most of them were rich. In the modern world, a much larger number than in the past can, if they wish, make an adequate living at a boring job while employing their real talents elsewhere. They include many of the people that companies like Google most want. They are productive enough when they work, so that they can afford, if they wish, to spend most of their time playing.

For a more extreme example, assume, as I think quite possible, that sometime in the next few decades we solve the aging problem. Having retired at 65 with a modest but adequate pension, what do you do for the next 50 or a 100 years? The answer may depend a lot on what looks like fun.

If this view of the future is correct, quite a lot of companies ought to be emulating Googles approach. It is hard for work to compete with play, but its not always impossible. Human beings want to have fun, but they also want to accomplish something, and in that dimension working for Google has some real advantages over playing World of Warcraft.

David D. Friedmanis an economist with a doctorate in physics who teaches at a law school and has just published his first novel, Harald(Baen Books).